The Grand Budapest Hotel

By AARON MESH

The old, snide rejoinder to an over-decorated show is that “you leave humming the sets,” but Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel may be the first movie where you come out tasting them. The titular Alpine resort is the most edible-looking lodge in cinema: a multitiered, pink-frosted castle designed to endure as an ambrosial memory. Our hero, M. Gustave, is the dapper concierge running the Grand Budapest front desk and back halls. He’s played by Ralph Fiennes with such flowery cosmopolitanism that you can almost see the cloud of cologne drifting behind him as he scurries to his next boudoir appointment with a rich dowager. I’d love to recite an ode to The Grand Budapest Hotel, because it’s the most politically aware story Anderson has told. It’s set in an imaginary Middle European country in the 1930s, at the edge of war. Its story, a silly caper, brushes against the deepest horrors of the 20th century, and ends by acknowledging irrevocable damage. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that something’s missing. The Grand Budapest Hotel confirms the split of Anderson’s work into three distinct periods. His earliest pictures (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums) feature perpetual teenagers play-acting at the ideal lives they can’t quite maintain. His second act (The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited) follows spoiled men globe-trekking for purpose. And then, starting with Fantastic Mr. Fox, come the fairy tales. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom and Budapest all include the same elements: stop-motion, maps, tunnels, and heroes marching at right angles and dangling from great heights. What they don’t have are characters who talk to each other. And with the exception of the fantastically realized M. Gustave, they don’t reveal their essence by actions. Who are these beautiful visitors in The Grand Budapest Hotel? They’re meant to be ghosts, but they shouldn’t be strangers. We stick out our tongues to catch the shimmering snowflakes, and taste only air.